Evie (2 page)

‘Tell him som’at’s come up an’ I needs to see him, urgent.’ Dave hesitated. He might as well tell Eileen, she’d hear about it soon enough. Everyone would. ‘Tell ’im ’tis Evie,’ he said.

‘Evie?’

‘Yeah. Tell him … and Mrs Todd … um … Bayliss, that Evie’s come back.’

In her bedroom at Higher Post Stone, the new Mrs Bayliss was enjoying her breakfast in bed. Roger, still in the first flush of husbandhood, had, the evening before, met the London train at Ledburton Halt and affectionately welcomed her home. He had missed her company during the week she had been in London where, now that her duties at the hostel were over, she was to spend some of her time working as a freelance consultant for a firm of architects. Although, given
the choice, Roger would have preferred her to have declined their offer, his tolerance of the arrangement had been, in part, a condition of her acceptance of his proposal of marriage. Nevertheless, his wish that she should have the satisfaction of achieving one of her ambitions was genuine enough and now he was enjoying watching her butter a slice of toast.

In her mid forties, relieved, after almost three years, of her unremittingly hard work as hostel warden, Alice’s newly achieved happiness with Roger, her son’s willing acceptance of his stepfather, together with her enjoyment of her status in the domestic design department of Woodrow Bradshaw & Associates, had restored to her appearance much of the charm of her youth. Her thick hair was still a rich, honey-blond, her eyes wide and clear, the skin on her slender neck, shoulders and arms, creamy, against the pale silk of her pyjamas. On her breakfast tray was a small pile of envelopes.

‘You’ve got some letters, my darling,’ Roger said, adding, ‘And a late butterfly on our windowsill’. He opened the window and watched the creature flutter out into the grey morning. ‘It didn’t seem worth sending the mail on to you. Should I have?’ Alice shook her head, bit into her toast and examined the letters.

‘Aha’ she said. ‘There’s one from Annie.’ She turned the envelope over and read the sender’s details on the back. ‘It says “from Mrs Hector Conway”. How sweet!’ Alice used her knife to open the envelope, took another bite of toast and began to read.

Annie’s registered name, when she first arrived at the hostel, had been Hannah Maria Sorokova. She was one
of the original intake of land girls who had arrived at the hostel, as Alice herself had, in early 1943, and the daughter of Polish immigrants who had established a thriving garment factory in the East End of London, into which Annie had been absorbed and was being primed for management. She was intelligent and beautiful. Dark-haired, dark-eyed and with the elegance typical of her race. When a Dutch refugee, given sanctuary on the farm, committed suicide, leaving, painted on a barn door, a spectacular depiction of the fate of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, Annie had been instrumental in preserving the work. Her efforts had introduced her to Hector Conway, a bookish arts graduate working for the War Artists Advisory Commission. As well as falling in love with her, Hector had revealed a new world to Annie and eventually the two of them had quietly and happily married. Hector was now curator of a north-country museum while Annie studied to become a librarian.

‘This is about Evie,’ Alice said, lowering her slice of toast and concentrating on the letter.

‘Evie?’ Roger repeated, vaguely.

‘Well, Evelyn,’ Alice murmured, her attention on the letter, ‘But we called her Evie …’

‘Wasn’t she the one whose husband, Norman something – a corporal, as I remember – turned up at the hostel, and hauled her off?

‘Yes …’ Alice murmured, reading on. ‘My God!’ she exclaimed. ‘When was this written?’ She checked the postmark.

‘Why?’ Roger asked.

‘I’ll read it to you … she says, “Dear Alice. There is something you must know. Hector had some business in Stratford-on-Avon (not far from Coventry) so we made a detour and called on Evie. What we found was very worrying. As you know we were all upset when her husband arrived at the farm and took her away but none of us could have known how bad things were going to get. Her husband opened the door to us and told us Evie was out. I thought I’d seen a movement in an upstairs window so we walked a little way along the road and watched from a distance. After a while her husband left the house. We retraced our steps and someone was waving from the attic window. It was Evie. She called down to us that she was locked in. Hector wanted to go for the police but Evie said no. She is scared of what her husband might do. I tied some money up in my hanky and Hector managed to throw it up to her. It was about ten pounds, which was all we had. Then she made us go, in case her husband came back. What should we do? Do you think Mr Bayliss would know?” The letter is signed Annie and Hector,’ Alice finished.

There was a tap on the bedroom door. Their housekeeper begged pardon but Dave Crocker was downstairs asking to see Mr Bayliss or Mrs Todd – she quickly corrected herself, ‘Um … I mean … Mrs Bayliss …’

‘Yes,’ Roger smiled, ‘We do know what you mean, Eileen!’ Eileen blushed. The sight of Alice Bayliss, as she now was, in Mr Bayliss’s bed was enough to bring the colour to her ageing cheeks.

‘And he won’t take no,’ Eileen finished, breathlessly.

‘I’ll see to him,’ Roger said to his wife. ‘You enjoy your breakfast, darling.’

‘But … This letter!’ Alice began.

‘One thing at a time,’ he told her, reverting to a long-established air of authority.

‘Where is she now?’ Roger asked, when Dave concluded a confused account of the discovery of Evie Clark, hiding in the lower farmhouse.

‘I’ve took ’er over to me mother’s,’ Dave said. Rose Crocker had set up home above her tea shop in Ledburton village some months previously, leaving the tied cottage at the lower farm to her son and his new wife. ‘We ain’t got no room for ’er, see,’ Dave said, straightening his broad back and meeting his boss’s eyes. ‘An’ anyroad, sir,’ he said, slightly more firmly than Roger was expecting, ‘I bain’t riskin’ that bastard turnin’ up at Lower Post Stone, lookin’ for ’is missus and findin’ mine! Lord on’y knows what ’e might do if he thought we was hidin’ Evie! He’s beaten ’er, you know! Black and blue she be!’

‘Understood, Dave,’ Roger said, evenly. ‘You did absolutely the right thing. Probably a good idea if you work close to the lower farm until we get things sorted. Use the time to repair the wall round the slurry pit. Been meaning to get that seen to for a while. One of those things that gets put off, eh!’ He brought a hand down in a paternal way onto his cowman’s massive shoulder. ‘Better get on your way now, just in case.’

Dave acknowledged his orders, threw a leg over the crossbar of the mud-spattered bicycle and freewheeled down the steep lane that ended at the lower farmhouse. Although
unaware of it, he was feeling the benefit of Alice’s steadying influence on her new husband, a man whose darker side had, in the past, made him unpopular with his workforce. He was a fair boss but well established as moody or cold.

Rose Crocker had lit her boiler, filled her bath tub, found a pair of slacks, a blouse, a jumper and some underwear for Evie and left her in the steamy little washroom to let the hot water ease her bruises and remove the stains and traces of her prolonged journey and the days she had spent hiding in the deserted hostel.

Clean and rested, Evie had joined Rose in her kitchen where she was loading into her oven a batch of pasties, which were doing better at this time of the year than the cream teas she sold to holidaymakers in high summer.

Evie was aware that Rose was avoiding eye contact and that her lips were pursed in a way which, experience had taught her, was a sign of disapproval.

‘It’s ever so good of you, Mrs Crocker,’ Evie ventured, timidly. ‘Taking me in and everything.’

‘I’m doing it for my Dave, Evie. I don’t want that husband of yours turnin’ up at Lower Post Stone and upsetting Hester and the baby. I knows ’e done wrong, strikin’ you. But I daresay there’s some as would say you had it comin’.’ Rose closed her oven door rather more noisily than was necessary.

After Norman Clark, home from his long internment in a German POW camp, had arrived at the hostel that summer evening and demanded that his wife return with him at once to Coventry, word had got around that Evie’s evening walks had not been as solitary or as innocent as had been supposed, taken,
not alone, but with Giorgio Zingaretti, one of a local group of Italian prisoners of war. Distressed by her sudden departure, Giorgio had appeared at the hostel, where one of the girls – nobody was sure who – had given him Evie’s address. When he tracked her down in Coventry, her husband had clouted him with a length of lead piping, knocking him senseless. It had only been the thickness of his shaggy hair that limited the head injury to a gory, five-inch gash. He had made his way, groggily, back to Devon, put his throbbing head under a yard pump and washed away the dried blood.

‘You might say,’ Rose had continued, piously, ‘that ’tis none of my business, but the fact is that while your man was fighting for his country, you was misbehavin’ yourself with an enemy soldier!’

‘The Italians hadn’t been our enemies for ages, Mrs Crocker! They’d surrendered! And Norman wasn’t fighting them nor anyone else, ’cos he got captured in ’43 and he was in a POW camp himself after that!’

‘That’s as maybe,’ Rose conceded, bowed but far from beaten. ‘But that’s no excuse for your be’aviour, young lady. Not in my book it’s not!’ Evie stood, pale-faced, grey-blue eyes brimming.

‘If only you knew, Mrs Crocker … If only you—’ She was interrupted by Alice’s arrival. Roger Bayliss’s car had pulled up outside Rose’s door.

‘We want you to come to Higher Post Stone with us,’ Alice smiled. ‘Alright with you, Rose? We need to have a talk with Evie. To sort things out and make a plan. Mm?’

At the higher farm Evie was led along the wide hall and into the dining room. Higher Post Stone was not a grand residence. It was simply the comfortable home of a well-established and successful farming family and looked now very much as it had over all the years that Roger Bayliss, its present incumbent, had known it, first as a child, then as a young man who, at barely twenty and due to his father’s ill health, had taken over the running of both the farms. Following his first wife’s early death, Roger had found himself single-handedly raising Christopher, his only child. The growing boy’s life had revolved round his schooling while the father’s followed the routine of each farming year. They treated one another with respect rather than affection, while Eileen cooked and cleaned for them, taking the place of the missing mother when Christopher went through the usual childhood illnesses.

Evie was intimidated by the Bayliss dining room. The long, narrow table was the largest she had ever seen and the most highly polished. Alice led the way to one end of it where the three of them sat down. Alice placed Annie’s letter, in its envelope, on the table in front of her and smiled encouragingly at Evie. Eileen approached the table with a laden tray from which she dispensed coffee.

‘Milk?’ Alice asked Evie, and when the girl nodded, indicated to Eileen that she should add milk to Evie’s cup. Sensing that Eileen’s reaction to the unfolding situation would be similar to Rose’s, Evie sat with her eyes downcast, staring at her coffee cup, afraid to lift it in case her hand shook so much that she spilt its contents into her saucer. When Eileen had left the room she declined the biscuit
that Alice offered her and sat, wiping her eyes with a damp handkerchief and glancing briefly at Roger and then at Alice.

‘I’m ever so sorry,’ she began, ‘for being such a nuisance and everything. It’s all my fault, causing all this!’ Alice leant across the table and patted Evie’s hand.

‘You’re not a nuisance,’ she said reassuringly. ‘And it’s not your fault. We just want to help.’ Roger’s approach was more practical.

‘Shall we not start apportioning blame until we have all the facts, my dear? Now … Evie, in your own good time …’ Evie stared at him. If she understood what was expected of her there was little evidence of it. Alice suggested that she should try to relax, collect her thoughts and when she was ready, tell them what had brought her to this difficult point in her life.

Although Alice knew some of Evelyn Clark’s history, that her parents had separated and her marriage an unhappy one, she had not, she soon realised, involved herself any more than was necessary in her role as hostel warden in the details of the girl’s situation and was quite unprepared for what followed.

‘But I dunno …’ Evie whispered. ‘I dunno what to … Where do I start …?’ She twisted the handkerchief into a damp ball and bit her lip.

‘At the beginning?’ Alice suggested quietly. ‘Right at the beginning. When things began to get … well … complicated.’ There was a pause while Evie sat, her eyes fixed on Alice’s, the three of them becoming aware of the measured ticking of the grandfather clock.

‘I weren’t much more’n a kid,’ Evie began, surprisingly. ‘Ten years old when me Dad left us and then he died.’ Slowly
the facts began to emerge, one leading on to the next. Her father’s insurance policy had paid off the mortgage on the two-bedroom ‘back-to-back’ in a Coventry suburb but there was no money coming in and Enid, her mother, took work on the assembly line of a local factory where she met an unskilled labourer, fifteen years her junior. There had been no physical attraction between them but Enid was an insecure woman who had been overdependent on her late husband. With him gone she had needed someone to fix the gutters, mend the gate, lay new lino in the kitchen and contribute to the household budget. Norman Clark was to fulfil these requirements in return for cheap lodgings.

Before long the heavily built man, with his florid face, thick neck and belligerent expression, had established himself in the dingy little house, placed his razor, strop and shaving brush on the bathroom shelf and unpacked his few possessions in what had been Evie’s bedroom while she moved in with her mother.

‘At first I didn’t like him being there,’ Evie told them, her eyes moving from Alice’s to Roger’s, ‘’cos he made the place smell of cigarettes, and on Friday nights of his dirty overalls and his beer. But it suited Mum. He bought a little car and he took us for outings in it. Sometimes there was trips to the pictures, or to a cafe for tea and cakes. Mum liked that.’